its not usually possible to install 2 copies of the same app on Windows, and most apps can't be installed/moved by copying folders around, Visual Studio 2008 comes in at ~13K files, 1K dirs, and 1.7 GB

aslong as every binary in the process is GCC made, and was made by the exact same GCC binary (oh yes, all 3 Windows GCCs (cygwin, Mingw64, and Ming.org) use incompatible definitions of DWARF), C debugging will work, unless you need to step into the asm of a MS binary, or you are doing an enumeration callback from a MS binary

I've tried Vmware, its daemons are huge in RAM and count, installs a ton of drivers/devices in the host, I keep it off and disabled most of the time, I've only used it for Windows 98 testing (crashing every 10-15 mins :D)

I need time to think over/research the VC 2008 upgrade, since I'm SP0, also if it really will fix the problem or not ("We, MS, never claimed C++ TR1 compliance, just selective features, sue us, you will loose")

the way I do this in my GUI is a pull from the github repo of the other person, then a push to my github repo, then on github, my timeline is identical to his, and I "reject" his pull request on github since I did actually merge his changes, but not the github way

when I what to extract something from a commit that is at the end of a line, (not necesserily my line), I make a new branch on my disk, pull from foreign remote branch into new local branch, then do ammend commit, unstage hunks/lines that I dont want, then commit, then push to my github's repo under master branch

repos are regularly deleted, people easily can do force pushes, and rewrite history, and your SHA1s are now totally different from theirs, (and their old SHA1s are now your SHA1s that can't be traced to them anymore)